Warm Tropics and Hot Topics

  Saipan (and Hiroshima again), Northern Mariana Isl.
Thursday, July 5, 2007

The more observant among you will have noticed that there have not been very many of these recently. Depending on how you define 'recent', indeed, you could say there have been none. So, in an attempt to put things right, I started this nearly five months ago. Nearly five months later, the sum total of my efforts was a solitary letter "a", a notice on the site saying "This is a draft", and a website that had changed all my previous entries' map pins so that Yokohama was in the middle of the sea.

You see, I have been knackered. I wish I could say that this was because of all of the truly great works I have accomplished. I wish it so much, in fact, that I will say it, rather than confess that I had fallen into the quintessential trap of living in Japan: I was working and studying too much.

Those who knew me at university, particularly Sheffield, may treat this with ever-so-slight a feeling of skepticism. After all, to work "too much" as an American Studies student involved, er, studying America. For more than two hours a week. Near exam time. However, the rigours of actually taking responsibility for things, and in the process doing more than reading the blurb of a large Henry James novel, left me little time for a life, let alone time to write. In truth, the time I was taking to do that was really getting to me and so in February I stepped down from my lofty position after eight months, and became a plain old regular teacher again. Suddenly, flushed with time and reenergised I sat poised over the keyboard...

...and decided to commit insane ammounts of time to studying Japanese. So for three months until very recently indeed, I was attending a school five days a week, three hours a day before heading off to work, and sneaking in bits of homework on student no-shows and breaks. On the back of an average of 13 minutes of sleep a night,

Japanese Viking

and a few minutes shy of total mental breakdown, the term ended with me giving a speech at our "graduation ceremony" in front of the whole school (that's right, in front of two whole classes - and half of mine even managed to show up) about how the words "mansion" and "viking" got a tad lost in translation into Japanese. (See and click right, and see here a previous discussion of "mansion".) This was much to the puzzlement of everyone listening, who were not native English speakers, and so had no idea what "mansion" and "viking" were in English in the first place. As our newly-annointed Prime Minister would no doubt agree, when speaking in public, if ya' can't wow 'em, confuse and/or bore 'em.

Anyway, all of this is a very roundabout way of saying: sorry I have been out of touch, not just through this medium but altogether, for so long.


This being a Travelogue, I should actually go on to something travel-related and worth reading. Being incapable of so great an achievement,

Palm Tree

however, I will merely say that last November I left these shores once more and visited the Pacific island of Saipan. At the time, I was certainly in more need of a holiday than I had been after my punishing two lectures a week on Henry David Thoreau or Thomas Jefferson, and never before had man so appreciated the sight of sand and palm trees (click photos, left and below right). And for four whole days, I was able to appreciate until I was clean out of appreciation.

Saipan Beach

Saipan is a tiny tropical island, which in the way of these things, is surrounded by the ocean, although on one side it is protected by a coral reef. The consequence is a sea rivalling a conspicuously empty bath for its placidity, and clear, turquoise water the likes of which I had never seen before. So crystalline, indeed, that WWII fighter planes and naval craft sit perfectly clear on the sea bed, surrounded by tropical fish of countless varieties, as if entirely unmoved by the sixty years since their bloody demise.

Managaha Island

This made for some excellent snorkelling, and would have made for perhaps even more excellent diving but for the fact that I just couldn't be arsed. The jewell in this rather decorative crown is an even tinier coral islet a few kilometers from the shore. My own photo attached here doesn't really do much justice to Managaha Island so I will link to a better one - a-clicky here - say thanks to that site's owners, and have done with it. Absolutely breathtaking.

At the far north of the island is a wilder and certainly more sobering aspect. The precipitous drops of Suicide Cliff (actually a mountain) and Banzai Cliff (actually a cliff), are terribly mournful places and yet still attract large numbers of visitors. As American forces swept up the island in 1945, the last remaining Japanese occupiers of Saipan faced the choice of a suicidal fight or, simply, suicide. Hundreds chose the latter. Soldiers and civilians, men, women and children stood at the top of the mountain or the cliff, turned to face a distant Japan, shouted Banzai and jumped.

Banzai Cliff

In my previous trip to Okinawa I didn't visit the underground complexes in which much greater numbers of Japanese took their own lives, but this smaller scene of desperation left a mark. This is probably one of the things I will never understand about Japan (and to be fair, most Japanese born after the war probably can't understand it either), but I just couldn't get my head round why so many people would do this. Naturally, there are several memorials on the cliff top, although not being able to read most of them led me no further towards an answer. In fact one of the few epitaphs with an English translation was a poem written by the current Emperor of Japan, lamenting the great loss of life "in defence of their homeland". I could only wonder that standards of education within the Japanese royal family have slipped somewhat over the years, as Akihito's sense of geography had misplaced Saipan by about 2200km. If I am being honest, this did make me a little angry. After all, it was in his father's name that they had been there in the first place. But I don't want to sound like the endless rantings of the Chinese Communist Party, and so I will say no more on that.

The Japanese have rather cleverly come to re-occupy Saipan, but now, of course, they no longer carry guns or wear uniforms. Weapons of choice these days are tourist maps, sun block and the Japanese love of shopping, a fearsome bombardment of such a small island that even the heaviest of artillery would struggle to match. You see, the official language of Saipan is English, its currency the US Dollar and, while domestically independent as part of the Northern Mariana Islands, it devolves foreign and defence policy to Washington. Yet everywhere you care to look, and even many places you don't, the Japanese language is dominant. Shop names and signs are in Japanese, "massage parlour" staff hustle by referring to everyone as shacho (CEO/company president) and tourists make notably limited efforts to communicate in the local language. I was trying to convince my Japanese girlfriend that this would be a wonderful opportunity for her to practice her English, but it turned into more of a sunny field trip for me. Indeed, on my journeys to and from the island with the wonderful Northwest Airlines (sarcasm is so difficult to convey in the written word), I am fairly confident I was the only non-Japanese passenger aboard the packed 747. Perhaps this should come as no surprise on a flight originating in Tokyo, although no one seemed to have informed Northwest's cabin crew, who snarled in English at anyone with the audacity to have actually turned up for the flight, and thus inconvenience them with another arduous trip to paradise. Maybe the last time they were there they were called something less flattering than "shacho"...

So, all-in-all Saipan was awesome, and definitely somewhere I want to go back to, although plans for the next foreign excursion take us a little further south.

And to smoothly transition into discussion of the New Year, a full six months ago, would be impossible. So for New Year, I returned to Hiroshima for a longer period and a more in-depth look than was possible on my previous visit some 8 months beforehand. This time I was able to get more of a feel for the city as a whole, or at least the modern city. I think Hiroshima is a remarkable place. Recently listed in Lonely Planet's most liveable cities in the world guide thing, its relaxed mood, fresh cuisine and simple yet effective transportation system all help make it very, er, liveable.

Peace Park

I've talked in some depth previously about the obvious historical significance of Hiroshima (see here if you've forgotten), but if anything the horrors so graphically displayed in the city's Peace Memorial Museum hit me harder the second time around. Without question, any visitor to the city should spend time there, but it really is not for the faint-hearted, and the gloom that inevitably accompanies those few hours in the museum lasts a lot, lot longer.

And so finally, what of the aforementioned "hot topics"? Well, as anyone who follows the Japanese news on a daily basis will tell you (and that must surely be everybody in the world ever plus one), I am the hot topic. Or rather, those with whom I am associated in a professional capacity have been a veritable series of hot topics over the past few months. Yep, we've been having a rough old time of it recently, culminating in some rather heavy government action against our business. I'll let anyone who is interested investigate for themselves rather than bore you with the details here, not that that usually stops me.

And am I worried by all of this?

I've had no time.

I mentioned I've been knackered, right?